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TAMPA, FLA.—When Steven Stamkos was a kid he would race his sister up the stairs, because he wanted to reach the top before she did. He was always like that, he thinks. When he lists the things he wants to be best at, it keeps going: who can lift the most weights, who can run around the track the fastest, softball, golf, everything. Oh, and hockey. He wants that, too.

“Every time I step on the ice I want to be the best player,” says the Tampa Bay Lightning captain, the day before his team was to face the Chicago Blackhawks in his first Stanley Cup final. “That hasn’t changed.”

He has, in some ways. Stamkos is just 25, but it has been a long, swerving trip already. He didn’t believe he could really be a star until the year before he was drafted, when he travelled to Columbus for the 2007 draft to watch Patrick Kane and Sam Gagner and Logan Couture get picked in the first round. They were a year older, and had dominated the OHL during his first year there, but they weren’t distant planets. Stamkos sat there and told himself, “You’re right there. You can compete with those guys. You just did it.”

A year later the Toronto native was the No. 1 overall pick, and after an early stretch where Barry Melrose treated him like dirt, he flourished. His career swerved, though, even though he was good the whole time. Stamkos just missed out on the 2010 Olympics; Tampa reached Game 7 of the conference final and lost 1-0, but he figured he’d be back. He led the league in scoring twice, missed the playoffs a couple times. Last season, he had 14 goals and nine assists in his first 17 games, and was continuing to work on his 200-foot game. Best hockey of his career, he thought.

Then Stamkos’s right tibia snapped when he crashed into a post in Boston, and he wasn’t right in time to make the 2014 Olympic team in Sochi. It was backchecking that screwed him, which was grimly ironic for a guy trying to make himself a complete player. It took him nearly a year to really feel like himself again.

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“I’m not going to lie, it was tough,” said Stamkos. “I mean, as easy as it was to say, I’ll be watching the games and cheering on my buddies . . . knowing a lot of the guys there, knowing you could have been there winning a gold medal, it sucked.

“I mean, in 2010, I was 19, I was just so happy to be in the mix. I mean, your name’s being thrown around out there, that’s pretty cool. To me, that was amazing. But this was the one I was looking forward from that day — to have a chance to represent my country, the start that our team had, that I had, I felt like I was playing the best hockey of my career. I really truly thought I was going to make it back on time. It didn’t work out. It was tough couple days, watching that.”

If it’s always taken Stamkos a little while to truly believe he belongs at the very top, 2014 was his chance to really be included in the great-player picture, and he missed it. The leg is healed now, but the 16-inch titanium rod is still in there, and it won’t let him forget. It still hurts when he wakes up, some days.

“That’s going to happen for a long time, I think,” said Stamkos. “But the mental part was the toughest. Every time you were skating hard back towards the net, just that thought creeping into your head. Or taking the puck hard to the net, or going in the corner knowing you’re going to get hit — that was the tough part. But you have to go through that to fully understand the magnitude that the mental side has.

“Now it’s fun to go out there again and have fun and not worry about anything. And just go play.”

Stamkos is aware that, fairly or not, a lot of people judge great players by how much they win. Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane are his natural comparisons in this series — the other captain, the other flashy No. 1 pick, the stars — and their legacies are tied up in Stanley Cups and Olympic medals, as much as anything. Stamkos wants what they have. He always has. This is his first chance to take it.

“You want to be like (Toews), because of what he’s been able to accomplish,” said Stamkos. “The way he plays the game, both ends of the ice, the respect that he has from his teammates, and obviously the respected leader that he is around this league. Because he’s a winner. And obviously, I want to be a winner. Everyone on our team wants to be a winner. And that’s what we want to do during this series, become winners.

“I truly want to win not because of what you guys will think of me, but I want to win. I mean, this is my first chance to play in the finals.”

So he’s been having trouble napping on game days, because the electricity of the games is running through him. He’s worried the Lightning might take games off and come back, lesson learned, the way they did throughout these playoffs, and he knows they can’t afford that against Chicago. He heated up in the second round after accepting a move to the wing. It’s easier, but this is still hard.

Stamkos talked for a long time, cheerful and thoughtful, and then towards the end the smile dropped clean off his face. He said, deadly serious, earnest as he could, “I want this so bad. Everyone who knows me realizes how much I want this. And I’m going to do whatever it takes to win it.”

He walked away. Steven Stamkos has waited a lifetime for this, and he is still the boy racing up the stairs, trying to get there first.

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